‘Infidel’ Offers Insights on Afghanistan

The last two decades have not given the people of Afghanistan much to smile about. Since being invaded by the crumbling Soviet Union in the 1980s, the nation has seen the collapse of a puppet communist government, the ravaging of its lands by militant groups called mujahideen, and the rise of the Taliban, one of the most notorious regimes in recent memory. A beacon of light following years of darkness, the US-led invasion in the wake of Sept. 11 failed to bring peace to the blood-stained country, serving only to reinstall some of the same vicious mujahideen that tore Afghanistan apart during the 1990s. But though the intricacies of the country have largely been overlooked by the Western world, one journalist, Kathy Gannon, devoted 18 years of her life to chronicling the tragedy, hope, and destruction that is the story of Afghanistan. Her relentless pursuit of the truth makes her 2005 tome, “I is for Infidel,” nearly impossible to put down.

Gannon journeys through the tragic modern history of Afghanistan, beginning in the 1980s with the fall of the Soviet-backed communist regime and moving through the Taliban years into the twenty-first century. Along the way, she chronicles the shifting alliances and sentiments that plagued the war-torn country. Her cogent analysis and engaging narrative provide a window into a country so often obscured and, she argues, outright ignored by the West.

Gannon’s narrative arc spans social and political divisions, with interviews that range from the most senior-ranking government officials in both the mujahideen and Taliban eras to average Afghani citizens of nearly every tribe and creed. Her book becomes more than an excellent political history; it is also a people’s history, interwoven with stories of normal Afghani people literally caught in the crossfire that add a layer of complexity to oft-cited terrorist stereotypes.

From the very first chapter, Gannon’s thesis is clear: The failure of Afghanistan is the failure of West. She accuses Western governments—and the United States in particular—of driving Afghanistan into chaos by permitting the ruthless mujahideen warlords to take control and refusing to work with even moderate factions of the Taliban. Initially, her portrayal of the mujahideen as ruthlessly bloodthirsty, the United States as laughably ignorant, and the international community as brutally uncaring seems harsh. But her seemingly sweeping generalizations gradually become more concrete, her claims substantiated through the incidents she cites. Though she gives the four-year rule of the mujahideen a close look, the real crux of the book is the Taliban as it ascends and eventually falls at the hands of US troops.

Her story of the early Taliban paints a nuanced picture of an organization founded to combat lawlessness and disorder in a country being torn apart by the US-backed mujahideen. Mullah Mohammed Omar, the founder of the Taliban and ultimately the man who imposed the harsh religious law for which the Taliban became infamous, had fought against the Soviet Union in the 1980s with forces President Ronald Reagan lauded as “freedom fighters.” Gannon describes him as a man with no aspirations to government and his organization as one with no intention of ever becoming a terrorist harbor.

She also refutes the commonly-held belief that Omar was close with bin Laden from the Taliban’s inception in 1994, calling it revisionist history and contending that the two men did not meet until the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in 1996. The Taliban that met with US forces in 2001 was a far cry from the Taliban that rose in the mid-1990s, having been manipulated by outside Arab and Pakistani forces including bin Laden, who was able to climb his way into the upper echelons of Taliban leadership. With no help coming from the international community, internal Taliban moderates were silenced. The United Nations’ tough stance on dealings with the Taliban only served to increase anti-Western sentiment and create the isolated nation Afghanistan became.

However, Gannon is not satisfied with the accepted Western stereotype of the Taliban as evil incarnate. She points out that the Taliban single-handedly eliminated opium production in Afghanistan during their reign, which previously had provided heroin to the international market. Ever since the American invasion, poppy production has climbed back up. Additionally, she contends that the terrorist training camps attributed to the Taliban were actually created under the mujahideen, the very same people the US helped to reinstall in its invasion.

Gannon ends the book with a rather bleak epilogue, calling on the West to forgo its hypocritical rhetoric and contradictory policies toward Muslim countries and their non-Muslim neighbors, which, she argues, only create the appearance that the War on Terror is, in fact, a War on Islam.

Perhaps when the West learns to look at itself as critically as Gannon does and provides the necessary support to rebuild a country wracked by years of turmoil, the Afghani people will finally have something to smile about.

—Staff writer Jamison A. Hill can be reached at jahill@fas.harvard.edu.